Gauchalland Colliery

Overview

A pit of the Gauchalland Coal Company on the south-west edge of Galston in Ayrshire, one of as many as fifteen mines working in and around the burgh at the end of the nineteenth century and employing some thousand men between them. What survives of it in the record is less about the workings than about the living: the royal commission that reported on Scottish housing in 1913 walked the company’s rows at Kinloch Square and set down what it found, down to the rent of a two-apartment house and the number of families sharing a privy.

History

Galston’s mining ran alongside its weaving and its older history — the burgh is better known for Barr Castle and its handba’ game than for coal — but by the end of the nineteenth century there were as many as fifteen pits in and around it, Streetheid, Maxwood and Gauchalland among them, employing around a thousand men. The official list of collieries at work in 1880 returns Gauchalland at Galston to the Gauchalland Coal Company. The Royal Commission on Housing in Scotland sent investigators through the Ayrshire miners’ rows in 1913, and their account of Kinloch Square and the Gauchalland Rows is the fullest picture of the colliery that survives. There were 36 houses in the square and rows, built of stone: six of a single apartment and thirty of two. A two-apartment house cost 2s 3d a week and a single 1s 6d, except in the High Gauchalland Row where six two-apartment houses went at 1s 9d. The front row, facing the main road, had a plot of ground in front railed off in wood. There was one closet for every two families and one washing-house for every six tenants; every tenant had a coalhouse, and the outhouses stood in the middle of the square, a respectable distance from the doors. Subsidence had cracked some of the walls and left the brick-tiled floors very uneven; the pathways were unpaved, though not very muddy on the day of the visit; the tenants of the back row complained that their houses were damp. The houses were said to be about sixty years old and were occupied by the mining population of the Gauchalland Coal Company. Water, at least, was plentiful. The pits around Galston closed one by one through the early twentieth century, and mining in the burgh ended altogether in 1933 with the closure of Maxwood, the last at work.

Geology

Coal Measures of the Ayrshire coalfield, in the valley of the Irvine Water. No account of the seams worked at Gauchalland specifically has been found in the sources reached.

Workings

No description of the underground workings has been found. What is recorded is the surface settlement: Kinloch Square and the Gauchalland Rows, thirty-six stone houses in a square with the outhouses set in the middle, the front row facing the main road with railed garden plots, and the whole so close to the River Irvine that when it overflowed the houses were inundated — three times in the nine years before 1913.

Closure

No closure date has been established. The Galston pits closed one by one through the early twentieth century and the last of them, Maxwood, stopped in 1933; Gauchalland was still housing its miners in 1913.

What remains

Nothing of the colliery or its rows has been identified on the ground. A memorial cairn to the miners of Galston killed in the pits — some of them boys of twelve and thirteen — was unveiled in 2009 opposite Barr Castle in the town.

None identified.

Nearby mines

• Maxwood Colliery — 2.2 km E
• Portland Colliery — 3.8 km W
• Barony Colliery — 14.9 km S

Straight-line distance, within 15 km. Show on the map.

Recorded claims

Individual factual claims, each attached to the source(s) that support it below. Where sources disagree, both are kept.

• Gauchalland at Galston was returned to the Gauchalland Coal Co. in the official list of collieries at work in 1880. ¹
• The Royal Commission’s investigators found 36 stone houses in Kinloch Square and the Gauchalland Rows — six single-apartment and thirty two-apartment — at rents of 1s 6d and 2s 3d a week, with one closet for every two families and one washing-house for every six tenants, occupied by the mining population of the Gauchalland Coal Co. ²
• Subsidence had cracked some of the walls and left the brick-tiled floors very uneven, the pathways were unpaved, and the tenants of the back row complained that their houses were damp; the houses stood so near the River Irvine that they had been inundated three times in the preceding nine years. ²
• Around the end of the nineteenth century there were as many as fifteen mines in and around Galston, including Streetheid, Maxwood and Gauchalland, employing about a thousand men; mining in the burgh ceased in 1933 with the closure of Maxwood. ³

Photographs & further reading

Sources

1. (secondary) List of coal mines UK 1880 — Coalmining History Resource Centre
2. (primary) Ayrshire miners’ rows, 1913: report to the Royal Commission on Housing (Scotland) — Ayrshire Archaeological and Natural History Society
3. (secondary) Covenanters, coal and the Covies — Ayrshire Magazine

Record created: 6 September 2026 · Last researched: 6 September 2026